Could be a great meme.

"Got the job as a security software engineer, ended up writing CSS"

It's pretty accurate for most software engineering roles out there. You whiteboard code to solve theoretical problems with algorithms you learned in college. The real job typically involves trying to get code from various languages, frameworks and platforms to work together. There may be one or two times where you actually use some obscure algorithm but that's it.

the inverse would be funnier in a scary kind of way.

I don't know what to call it, maybe the contrapositive, but if you do this for a living it's kind of surreal when you interview for a dev position and fail because you go too in-depth with underlying details.

I've been told, "you're a bit too paranoid about security, we'd recommend you memorize some of the answers to interview questions on StackOverflow if you're really interested in this."

The inverse is true in a lot of technology companies sadly. I once worked with a "network security expert" who got the job after 2 years as a front end web dev and zero real training in network security. He knew what SSL was so got promoted...

I was a Java Web Gui developer, typical stuff, so the architect of the project asked me to implement better security by reversing SHA512.

Specifically SHA512 he said, dont use SHA1 or SHA256 thats not good enough. And he explained several times how the security solution work, it would be based on reversing a hash function. As I shrugged it off, people say weird things sometimes, and offered a real solution he kept pushing for his solution. Weird but anyway maybe he just means what I mean but is using different words, so I implement a real solution, and then days later he questions my judgement and the solution because I didnt use his. Thats when I said "you cant reverse a hash function, in fact thats the point of it" and then point to the diagram he made see there, thats not mathematically possible. His title was Security Architect.

Yes... All that for writing java and doing CSS. Laughable.

I find it hilarious, I'm happy for him. He seems to be working on things he likes now.

yaa, and sharing his experience :)

Does Google still do this too? Last thing I knew Google would stick you wherever they decided, not necessarily where your strengths were and where you wanted to be.

I was under the impression (possibly wrongly) that you could relatively freely change teams at Google assuming you weren't entirely unsuitable for the job, and were reasonable about not changing team too frequently and actually getting stuff done.

From what I have heard, "not too frequently" means once every 18 months, so some people have complained about sticking on a team they don't like for a year and a half.